This one didn't start as a product. It started with my mother, visiting us in London, asking if I could find her a particular prayer in Marathi online.
I could. It was on a website that crashed her phone's browser and was ringed by flashing slot-machine ads. She laughed it off and put the phone down. I didn't laugh. I sat there a bit annoyed, mostly at the internet, and a few weeks later I started building something. Just for her. It got out of hand.
What it does
- Over 200 prayers, covering 35 deities.
- English, Hindi, and Marathi — read, listen, or both at once.
- Works fully offline, so it costs nothing in data.
- Daily alarms, if you want a nudge toward your practice.
- Search, so you find what you want without thumbing through a list for five minutes.
The things I was stubborn about
No ads. Not now, not ever. A prayer app with slot-machine ads in it is precisely the thing that started all this. The app is free and will stay free.
Typography that does the script justice. Devanagari deserves better than most apps give it. I lost actual weeks to font licences, baseline alignment, and line-height. Tiny things. They're the whole experience.
Faithful to the source. Every prayer was checked against traditional texts. Where regional variations existed, I noted them. Where I wasn't sure, I asked elders — which is also a fine excuse to spend an afternoon on the phone to relatives.
Built for old phones. It had to run on a six-year-old budget Android handset, because that's the phone a lot of the people who'd want this actually own, especially in rural India. Every megabyte was argued over. Every second of startup time mattered.
What the users taught me
It's been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times and holds a strong rating on the Play Store. I read the reviews — all of them — and the same few stories keep surfacing.
Older people use it every single day. Grandmothers who'd given up on prayer books because the print was too small are back at it on a tablet they can actually read. One family wrote to say their mother now leads the prayer at dinner again. I think about that email more than I should admit.
The diaspora uses it to hold on. Second- and third-generation families abroad keep practices alive that might otherwise thin out and disappear. "I learned my grandmother's favourite prayer from your app," one person wrote. That one stayed with me.
And people use it in places I never designed for — hospitals, funerals, weddings. Moments when a printed book is awkward and the phone is already in your hand. I didn't plan for any of that. I'm glad it's there for it.
Why write about it now
Because it's nearly ten years old and we still keep it running. Nothing dramatic — compatibility fixes, the odd translation correction a user has kindly flagged. It'll carry on.
It makes no money. It will never be a business. It's just a small, careful app that a lot of people use a little bit each day, and it's one of the most plainly good things I've ever helped build. That turns out to be enough.
